The same could be said about the theory of a flat earth. At some point 99.9% of the experts were pretty damn sure of that too.
No they weren't. The earth being a sphere has been the consensus expert view (at least amongst European experts) since midway through the first millenium BC at least.
The problem is science isn't done by consensus. Its done by proving hypothesis.
But if the consensus has arisen because the hypothesis has been 'proven' (ie hasn't failed any of the tests it has been subjected to so far) then you're golden. The problem for the guys on the skeptic side of this argument who keep repeating the 'science isn't about consensus' mantra is that the scientific consensus regarding GHG/CC is of this latter type.
The problem is nutters on the Green side equate people saying "you still haven't proven it" with people meaning "it doesn't exist."Is global warming real and a problem? Very well may be.
Fact (1) Global warming via GHGs (including, but not restricted to, CO2) is most definitely real - observations of the conditions on Venus, Luna and Mars give clearcut demonstrations of the effect in action. Fact (2) The rise in CO2 concentrations in the earth's atmosphere is most definitely real - we have ice core records going back 700k years and CO2 levels have never been as high as they are now. The second order delta is also extremely large, which is likely to prove significant as we go forward. Fact (3) The anthropogenic origin of this CO2 is most definitely real - the isotopic measurements of atmospheric CO2 point to fossil sources for this rise over the past 250 years and we have estimates of the state of the significant carbon sinks that correlates well with our estimates of fossil fuel consumption since 1750.
The combination of facts (1) and (2) gives rise to the hypothesis that we should expect to be observe a measurable warming signal that is world-wide and across many different categories of instrumentation and temperature proxies. This signal has indeed been observed in many different places, across many different data series, using many different instruments and observational protocols - promoting the hypothesis to a theory and bringing us to fact (3) which strongly implies that doing something about this CO2 forcing is within our capability as a civilisation if we decide that the potential downsides of the forcing warrants an intervention. An assessment of the likely effects of the observed forcing and investigations of the practicality of various potential interventions would seem to be in order. Metaphorically sticking fingers in our ears and shouting 'Lalala. I can't hear you!' would be.... unwise.
The MBH98 and subsequent papers are a very small part of the supporting data for Climate Change Theory, so in many ways the MM critique is a bit of a sideshow - it would (if it proves well founded, which is very much in doubt) knock out one piece of a much larger observational corpus, the implications of which would still need to be addressed in the policy arena. The extent to which the MM critique is spun up into 'Climate Change Theory Is Bunk' by people who want to forestall any consideration of the policy implications of fact (3) and carry on with the finger sticking/lalala shouting is a matter for some concern however.
There is some evidence that Jesus may have been married to Mary Magdalene, but this movie featured them fornicating.
Nope. The only time JC and MM fuck is in the 'last temptation' dream sequence at the end of the film. I don't think there's a marriage scene to explicitly rule out the possibility of this being fornication, but them being married is, at the very least, strongly implied.
It's strange, I watched the Last Temptation on TV last week and, for the life of me, I couldn't see what there was that could get half-way sincere religious people twisted out of shape. Its a profoundly spiritual film and one that accepts the fundamental truth of most of what the gospels describe (ie there are no-doubt-about-it miracles happening on-screen pretty much all the way through and the final shot is of Christ on the cross, triumphant in his sacrifice).
The only things I could think of were mostly to do with pretty reasonable historical inferences (ie the fact that C1st Judea was filthy and populated by suspiciously arab-looking people many of whom were up to their ears in an anti-Roman intifada) that would offend people who thought Jesus and his disciples were WASP dudes with hippy hair who had heavenly choirs breaking into song whenever they wandered into shot.
As such India and Pakistan were actually one country ruled by the Mughal emperors and were a unified nation long before the British.
Not really. See for instance this quote from a SOAS website:
"Yet even at its most powerful the Mughal empire was never a centralised autocracy. The emperor was Shah-an-Shah, the `king of kings', and this was a precise description rather than a piece of empty rhetoric. His power depended on being able to manipulate the many petty kings and notables who controlled resources and exercised authority in the cities, towns and villages of the empire. The emperor was never an absolute dictator, acting instead as an `entrepreneur in power' who was able to buy obedience by royal honours and enforce it on occasion by military might."
To say that this represents (present-day) India and Pakistan as a pre-Raj unified state is about as useful as saying that Europe between the Rhine and the Oder was a unified state because they elected a Holy Roman Emperor. The Mughals exercised a form of sovereignty yes, but it was severely circumscribed and Aurangzeb's attempts to enforce a more direct authority in the south stretched the system to breaking point (which is what gave the British their opportunity to 'divide and rule' the various successor states and establish their control over the subcontinent a couple of generations later).
Aerospace contracts Research into advanced materials, minaturisation techniques, comms, cybernetics, fuels etc Manufacturing/engineering know-how in above fields Remote sensing platforms Sale of launch services/payload mass to foreigners
Whether its a cost-effective use of Japanese tax yen is a tricky question, but given the standard Japanese pork-barrel projects are running out of places/ways to be spent (there are only so many rivers to dam and roads to build after all) maybe diversifying the pork is starting to look like a good idea.
Even if its true, yelling about it in this intemperate fashion makes you look like a loon to the 99% of people who can't spare the time to dig into the facts for themselves. Once you look like a loon you've pretty much lost the battle of perceptions and (absent a dramatic reality-check that exposes the true situation to even the most blinkered) you will go on to lose the battle of the facts.
Where many geeks fail is in their blindness to the social context of a situation and their privileging of facts over perceptions. Sure, external reality can bite you in the ass (see any number of Emperor's New Clothes moments throughout history) but in many cases the facts on the ground are a minor component of the overall situation and their external reality can can be easily swamped out by the social reality that an astute political type can construct/adapt to suit their agenda.
We need to get some hardcore memetic engineers on our side if we're going to win this thing.
Are you ok with a 60% increase in your gas prices?
Are you? There's a limited supply of the black stuff and as it gets rarer the price will go up. You stateside guys need to be doing things about your addiction to oil now if you want to avoid a nasty bout of cold turkey later in the century.
Yeah but over a relatively short time (years or decades) the landfill starts seeping methane and returns the C to the atmosphere.
Some of the C might remain sequestered in the ground permanently (for values of 'permanently' suitable to the timescales our civilisation needs to be thinking over these days), but if a barrel of the gobble-gas substitutes for a barrel of diesel mined out the middle east its a net win carbon-wise.
Unfortunately, it's almost two orders of magnitude less expensive to use our military to "protect our oil supplies" and ensure we get the oil and not the rest of the world than it is to make ourselves energy independent.
There's also the consideration, implied elsewhere in your post, of sectional and relative advantage.
Being energy independant is nice for the US (as a whole) but for the US's ruling elite its not so good - partly because they are heavily invested (literally and metaphorically) in fossil fuels and partly because ruling an energy-independant USA is not such a great thing if the RoW (by which we mean chiefly mean India, China and Russia) is thus able to bootstrap itself to great power status with the reserves made available to them once the US recuses itself from the world oil market.
As you say the US being primus inter pares (or even just a 'concert of powers' nation) as the C22nd dawns is not what rocks the NSC's socks, even if such a US would be far more comfortable than the alternative 'one eyed man in the country of the blind' sort of scenario you sketched out.
I have no idea if that sort of zero and negative sum long-range thinking is an overt part of what the prognosticators inside the Beltway get up to but (a) I wouldn't be at all surprised if it was and (b) even if it doesn't happen in such a baldly machiavelian fashion the institutional set-up in the beltway circus practically mandates an outcome that would have been produced by said machiavel.
You're comparing apples to oranges - the retail price of diesel in the UK to the wholesale price of this oil. If the wholesale price of this oil is $80/barrel, you then need to add on the various taxes that are imposed on oil in the UK to find out what the retail price would be in the UK.
You are, of course, correct. However it is entirely possible that a UK govt looking for ways to hit the CO2 reduction targets they've set for themselves would look favourably upon tax-breaks for diesel originating from these processes.
We already have mechanisms whereby certain sectors can get duty-free diesel, so it should be relatively easy to transition to an administrative regime whereby fuel duties were tied to their fossil carbon loading and 'recovered' diesel and other bio-fuels could compete at the retail selling point.
The key question would be whether those sectors which currently enjoy duty-free privileges on their diesel (farmers chiefly as it happens) could be transitioned off their cheap fuel without provoking unacceptable political or macroeconomic consequences. *That* is a bullet which is going to have to be bitten at some point (and soon) - but the prospect of agricultural areas getting a new source of income (providing feedstock) and employment (running the facilities) might be enough to sweeten the pill of the increased input costs imposed on the farmers. The devil, as ever, lies in the details however.
The Nature page mentions a fortran program is included in one of the folders (don't recall which one).
Its a ~1KB text file, so fairly weeny but I've never worked with fortran so I have no idea if that's significant.
From reading various commentaries which discuss the methodological underpinnings of the study (PCE and similar statistical black magic) I would imagine the algorithm slings PCEs around in some fashion - but as I have never worked with fortran or PCEs and glazed over big-time when we broached multivariate analysis in my degree course lo these many years gone by I am utterly incompetant to assess whether the data thus provided are enough to permit suitably skilled yet disinterested observers to reproduce the analysis and make an informed critique of the methodology.
I presume they are, because the hasty google I ran in the wee hours of the morning didn't turn up any 'Mann releases inadequate data in order to hoodwink reviewers' sort of links and I believe that the editors at Nature wouldn't lend themselves to such shenanigans. I could be wrong of course, but I think that's a reasonable position to take in the circumstances.
The initial bump isn't perfect, but it's not a global effects issue. Cutting over to cycles like bio-ethanol, bio-methanol, vegetable biodiesel or Thermally Depolymerized biodiesel do reduce the CO2 impact of transportation fuels to effectively nothing.
There's a crucial qualification. Its only carbon net-zero for the proportion of transportation fuels that can be effectively switched across to these alternative sources.
Anyone care to take a WAG as to what fraction of the USA's current diesel consumption would be substituted if all of the turkey guts in the USA's agricultural sector were redirected to this process at an 80% recovery efficiency?
I'd do it myself but I need to grab a sandwich before my next meeting.
Yeah, but all the examples Crichton cites of how the scientific consensus has been tooth-grindingly wrong in the past are of the 'excess conservatism, skeptical of fads' type. Given that the Global Warming hypothesis is a new thing, rather than a longstanding orthodoxy, these are poor examples to use if you are trying to make a coherent argument that the current scientific consensus is malign and/or wrongheaded.
The difficulty for Crichton is that there are very few examples where science gets it wrong by embracing an idea too quickly (off the top of my head I can't think of any examples, although doubtless someone will chip in with some suggestions soon enough). He makes a stab at it with his example of SETI and the Drake Equation, but I thought this was an incredibly weak and wrong-headed argument. SETI may have got its initial start back in the 60s but it went pretty much nowhere for the next 40 years for most of the reasons that Crichton slammed it - an absence of useable data and therefore no way to test hypotheses or form theories. SETI has only got going again in recent years because the computational power is now available to make a decent fist of analysing enough data to do a proper survey of the sky and the work done locating extra-solar planets has shown that you can achieve meaningful things even with the paltry sensor data we can currently muster. Even so SETI remains a distinctly poor relation in astronomy and what kudos its garnered is largely due to the work SETI@home has done developing distributed computing tools for brute-force data analysis. So this is hardly a shining example of bandwagon jumping scientists. Crichton's on slightly stronger ground with the nuclear winter example, but by Crichton's own account Sagan et al didn't create a scientific orthodoxy with their media grandstanding, he concedes that many scientists were skeptical of the proposition (albeit many were reluctant to air their skepticism in the general media) and that this skepticism deepened as it was put under scientific scrutiny. So again this is actually a good demonstration of how day-to-day science is actually an institution which is extremely small-c conservative at heart - which is a problem if, like Crichton, you are trying to argue that in this case an entire field of study has been captured by flim-flam artists who are pulling the biggest con of the century on the world out of some misguided desire to stick it to Uncle Sam.
I also think it is interesting that the people who mutter darkly about how PC, liberal, anti-capitalist, US-hating, bien pensant orthodoxy is the real driving force for the current scientific consensus on climate change overlook how scientists behaved when they were subjected to the posterchild historical example of this sort of politically mandated science - namely Lysenkoism.
Even with the horrendous coercive power of the Stalin-era soviet state hanging over them, significant numbers of established scientists went to the gulag rather than bend to the politically motivated orthodoxy that was imposed upon them and an entire generation of Russian students deserted biology completely when it became clear that they wouldn't be permitted to pursue any line of research whose results might threaten the party line.
Is anything remotely similar happening in climate science today? Have dozens of eminent climatologists been arrested by Green Army cadres and forced to admit their guilt before being despatched to work camps in Nunavut? Are ambitious young grad students deciding that geology or marine biology won't require that they sign away their scientific conscience if they want to get a decent postdoc assignment? I think not.
Therefore if the climate change conspiracy theorists are correct and this whole warming thing is a put-up job - in the absence of a stalin-style tyranny physically oppressing dissenters, where are they? Where are the scientists who have sat down with the data, given it a thorough going over the best way they know how and are convinced that th
You labeled RealClimate.org's critique as a "detailed examination." But was it really that detailed? I read it, and it seems to me that they are only able to raise three objections, which I will detail here (easy, since there are only three):
You're right, its not a detailed examination. From what I can see they picked out the three points for comment that they did because most of Crichton's lecture was not about the specific details of peer-reviewed climate science and therefore wasn't relevant to the editorial remit that the RealClimate.org website has set for itself.
Gotta give 'em some props for sticking to what they know don't you think?
You might also consider that Mann refuses to release the complete dataset on which he based his research as well as the algorithm used to generate the graph. This means his work cannot be validated by anyone else because he is not making available the conditions for the experiment.
Go here if you want the data Mann, Bradley and Hughes used for the 'hockey-stick' paper.
Crap, I spent a couple of hours composing a reply to this post which got lost when I inadvertently 'selected all' and then overtyped with the space key (frikkin IE, no undo item on the edit menu...grrr). I'll try and gather my thoughts and retype it but I may not have time before this article gets locked for more comments.
In the meantime I will deal with this to be going on with:
Me: So the guy on the news who tells me that tomorrow there's going to be bright sunshine and 70+ temperatures isn't telling me 'what I expect'
You: Yes he is, you goofball. What you predict is functionally equivalent to what you expect, and the guy on the news telling you that "tommorow there's going to be" is giving a prediction (which he expects to happen -- otherwise he'd lose his job).
Firstly, I was civil to you in my post. I'd appreciate it if you could return the favour.
Secondly, you overlooked the specifics of my example and so missed the point I was trying to make. Here it is again, hopefully phrased in a more explicit fashion.
Let us imagine that tomorrow (24th Feb 2005) the weather in London is going to be sunny and 70 degrees. Now for anyone remotely familiar with the climate of London in February, this would most definitely not be 'what you expect'. London in February is miserable - chilly, overcast, damp... all the cliches about the English climate rolled into one (barring the fog, we hardly ever get the sort of pea-soupers Basil Rathbone had to deal with when he was being Sherlock Holmes, but I digress).
Let us further imagine that the guy doing the weather bulletin tonight (23rd February) has an accurate forecast for tomorrow (this isn't so incredible - the Met Office is actually pretty good out to 72 hrs these days, which is just as well given the amount of money they spend). Now this weather guy, being a professional meteorologist, is intimately familiar with London's climate so he knows 'what to expect' for London in February, but he also has a forecast which says that the weather (ie the actual meteorological conditions that are going to occur over London on the next day) is going to differ radically from what all his training and experience tells him is the norm for London at this time of year.
So he starts his bulletin by saying that its going to be sunny and 70 degrees tomorrow (ie 'I expect the weather will be XYZ') and then he probably then goes on to say how unusual this is when compared with what you would normally expect and imparts some factoid like 'this will be the highest ever February temperature for London since detailed records started to be kept in the seventeenth century' or something (ie. 'But if I hadn't seen all the data that's come in over the last three days I would have expected it to be ABC').
Thus his text for the bulletin demonstrates that he he has two, contradictory, expectations. The specific one (which relates to the actual weather that is forecast to occur at this place and that time) and a more general one (which relates to the statistical trend encompassing all the weather events for the relevant place over a specific, usually long, period of time).
...if a model can recreate what has already happened then that increases confidence that this model has something useful to say about the system being modelled. Yes?
...if some models do a better job of recreating observed reality from a known starting point than a bunch of other models, there are grounds for saying that these models appear to be closer to the gnarly reality than those other models that don't produce as close a match. Yes?
Furthermore the activity of taking these models and testing them in this way; seeing where they diverge from the observed reality and then digging in to the model (and how the reality was observed) in order to figure out where and how the artefacts have occured. This sort of studious, painstaking and rigorous testing (which is what a large fraction of the work done in the climate modelling field actually is) is a hell of a long way from your original assertion that these arrogant asshole climatologists depend solely on computer models and pay no attention to the real world. So thanks for conceding the point, however gracelessy.
Moving on to your new point - yes actually, it's a big deal when computer models can replicate what has been historically observed. AFAIR everyone I've encountered in the climate modelling field concedes that the early computer models left a lot to be desired and did a piss poor job of replicating historical trends when given the initial conditions. But the models have been subjected to a huge amount of refinement over the years and one of the ways climatologists are confident that this refinement was productive is because now the models can replicate historical trends and do so to very demanding confidence levels. Models can always be improved of course and in the sort of non-linear systems under discussion there are almost certainly going to be unanticipated factors that only emerge as the system moves a significant distance from its previous equilibrium (as would appear to be happening with the global climate). So I fully expect that next year's models, and next decade's for that matter, will be better than those that went before.
Having said all that the bad news to date for those who doubt the climate change hypothesis (actually its bad news for all of us) is that as the models have been refined, the predictions they make when you run them forward into the unknown are pretty much always worse than was previously supposed. The forcing effects observed in these models when run into the future are almost always larger and more rapid than the most pessimistic assumptions of even a few years ago.
That, for me, is the really fucking scary part. Obviously its not exactly great that things appear to be happening to our climate which look like they'll screw things up for large fractions of the human race; but its really bad that after nearly twenty years of effort to scope out the size and severity of the problem we seem to be facing, climatologists are still groping for the bottom of how bad it could get and are regularly reporting back to say that sorry, the hole appears to be even deeper than was previously estimated.
Personally I'd be over the moon if it turned out that there really is some horrendous methodological or institutional bias in the climatological field that means this whole thing has been the biggest scientific fuck-up since Lysenkoism; but given the number of people who are working on this problem, all the different axes its being attacked from, the fact that practically all of the disputation within the field is about how fast climate change is happening as opposed to whether it is happening and the regular litany of 'the heating trend is more severe than was previously thought' results that get reported - the odds of this actually being the case seem, to me, to be vanishingly small.
You appear to have overlooked the fact that the study these 'arrogant' scientists were conducting was in fact a test of several different models against a 40 year series of actual ocean temperature measurements. So they were taking these models that you contend they unquestioningly rely upon and stacking them up against real-world data to see if they were any good.
God damn those pesky scientists and their arrogant way of looking for facts to back up their conclusions. God damn them all to hell.
You know, when making cracks about people's literacy (or lack of same); it helps if you can actually spell.
Regards Luke
NB Any post correcting spelling is inevitably going to have a spelling mistake of its own. In an effort to pre-disaster this post I've decided to misspell this ward here.
I don't think it was absolute. His statement was, "increasingly," not "entirely" or "all."
No. Crichton's statement (specifically the bit that was italicised for emphasis by RealClimate.org) was:
"No longer are models judged by how well they reproduce data from the real world"
The 'increasingly' you have latched onto is in the subordinate clause that follows on from this, where Crichton rows back from the bold rhetorical claim that he wants his audience to remember. RealClimate.org's critique focuses on the main claim, not the weasel words Crichton puts in as a get out of jail card. So they turned to the IPCC Report that Crichton cited in the bibliography to his novel (and thus can be assumed to have read), which gives a good overview of current research and point to ~150 pages in that report that go into how climatoligists take computer climate models and assess them against RW data.
How does this square with Crichton's subsequent claim in this article that such models are no longer being checked against the real world?
[on comparing two different kinds of predictions]
A weather prediction. I expect you to want to reply, "But see! That's not weather, that's climate!"
No, it is not a weather prediction, yes - it is a climate prediction. Woe is me, I have fallen into your cunning trap...
Which is a good time to point out a question that you've chosen to ignore: If what you say is true, then why did RealClimate.org define things the way they did (specifically, weather == "what you observe", climate == "what you expect")? This is not a rhetorical question. Answer it!
and upthread you wrote...
If "climate," by RealClimate.org's own admission is "what you expect," then that definition is functionally equivalent to a weather prediction
By which I think you're saying that RealClimate's definition ('what you expect') applies to any forecast/prediction, right? Because a prediction or a forecast is what you are expecting to happen?
Sadly you have misread the RealClimate writer's intent. If you had bothered to follow the threedefinitionallinks that they included in the subsequent sentence you would have found that actually they (or rather, climatologists) define 'climate' as the statistical average of various meterological metrics over a wide area and time, whereas 'weather' is an instance of those self-same metrics for a specific time and location.
Thus the 'what you expect' part of the tag refers to the statistical nature of what climate is rather than any predictive attributes it might have, whilst the 'what you get' part of the tag refers to the specificity of what weather is (or will be).
So the guy on the news who tells me that tomorrow there's going to be bright sunshine and 70+ temperatures isn't telling me 'what I expect' (in February, in London) but it might well be 'what I get' (not this week it seems however, brrrr!).
OK, but the distance from Albany to Montgomery is near enough the same as the distance from London to Rome, Stockholm, Warsaw or Budapest.
Italians, Swedes, Poles and Hungarians are culturally quite distinct from most of the people I'll meet on my daily round (for the sake of this discussion we'll leave out those I know who have immigrated to London from those other places).
People from these places speak different languages, use different money, obey different laws, decide their vote on different issues, believe different things, holiday in different places, eat different food, drink different booze, buy things in different shops.... there's a lot of differences there, OK?
Convergence under the auspices of the EU is breaking some of these differences down, but the process will take decades/generations to get to where the US is now (if it can get that far at all).
I'm late to the game but, as a service to sanity, could the horde of kneejerk posters who have spewed variations on:
* Michael Crichton says its a con * They were talking about an ice age in the 1970s why can't they get their story straight? * Its all fluctuations in the sun's output * Volcanoes produce way more CO2 than us * They can't tell if it'll rain tomorrow, how can they talk about a hundred years from now? * There isn't a solid consensus about climate change * So what if all the scientists agree? Science isn't a popularity contest * We'll farm the tundra * The scientists are all in it for the grant funding * Climate Change is an anti-american plot
and similar rants check out the relevant RealClimate.org articles so that next time they'll be a bit more informed on the subject.
There was a documentary on BBC Radio 4 last night discussing software patents. It didn't really touch upon the current shenanigans in Brussels and there was nothing new for those of us here who are familiar with the various arguments but I thought it was an interesting straw in the wind - the issue appears to be creeping up the news agenda a bit.
Anyone interested can get an audio stream of the programme from the BBC's listen again website for the next few days. The strand was 'In Business' and the patent programme will be available up until the next episode in the strand is broadcast (Wed or Thurs I think).
Slashdot Mirror
Correction. They are an economist and an exploration geologist (currently on sabatical).
Regards
Luke
But if the consensus has arisen because the hypothesis has been 'proven' (ie hasn't failed any of the tests it has been subjected to so far) then you're golden. The problem for the guys on the skeptic side of this argument who keep repeating the 'science isn't about consensus' mantra is that the scientific consensus regarding GHG/CC is of this latter type.
Fact (1) Global warming via GHGs (including, but not restricted to, CO2) is most definitely real - observations of the conditions on Venus, Luna and Mars give clearcut demonstrations of the effect in action.
Fact (2) The rise in CO2 concentrations in the earth's atmosphere is most definitely real - we have ice core records going back 700k years and CO2 levels have never been as high as they are now. The second order delta is also extremely large, which is likely to prove significant as we go forward.
Fact (3) The anthropogenic origin of this CO2 is most definitely real - the isotopic measurements of atmospheric CO2 point to fossil sources for this rise over the past 250 years and we have estimates of the state of the significant carbon sinks that correlates well with our estimates of fossil fuel consumption since 1750.
The combination of facts (1) and (2) gives rise to the hypothesis that we should expect to be observe a measurable warming signal that is world-wide and across many different categories of instrumentation and temperature proxies. This signal has indeed been observed in many different places, across many different data series, using many different instruments and observational protocols - promoting the hypothesis to a theory and bringing us to fact (3) which strongly implies that doing something about this CO2 forcing is within our capability as a civilisation if we decide that the potential downsides of the forcing warrants an intervention. An assessment of the likely effects of the observed forcing and investigations of the practicality of various potential interventions would seem to be in order. Metaphorically sticking fingers in our ears and shouting 'Lalala. I can't hear you!' would be.... unwise.
The MBH98 and subsequent papers are a very small part of the supporting data for Climate Change Theory, so in many ways the MM critique is a bit of a sideshow - it would (if it proves well founded, which is very much in doubt) knock out one piece of a much larger observational corpus, the implications of which would still need to be addressed in the policy arena. The extent to which the MM critique is spun up into 'Climate Change Theory Is Bunk' by people who want to forestall any consideration of the policy implications of fact (3) and carry on with the finger sticking/lalala shouting is a matter for some concern however.
Regards
Luke
It's strange, I watched the Last Temptation on TV last week and, for the life of me, I couldn't see what there was that could get half-way sincere religious people twisted out of shape. Its a profoundly spiritual film and one that accepts the fundamental truth of most of what the gospels describe (ie there are no-doubt-about-it miracles happening on-screen pretty much all the way through and the final shot is of Christ on the cross, triumphant in his sacrifice).
The only things I could think of were mostly to do with pretty reasonable historical inferences (ie the fact that C1st Judea was filthy and populated by suspiciously arab-looking people many of whom were up to their ears in an anti-Roman intifada) that would offend people who thought Jesus and his disciples were WASP dudes with hippy hair who had heavenly choirs breaking into song whenever they wandered into shot.
Regards
Luke
"Yet even at its most powerful the Mughal empire was never a centralised autocracy. The emperor was Shah-an-Shah, the `king of kings', and this was a precise description rather than a piece of empty rhetoric. His power depended on being able to manipulate the many petty kings and notables who controlled resources and exercised authority in the cities, towns and villages of the empire. The emperor was never an absolute dictator, acting instead as an `entrepreneur in power' who was able to buy obedience by royal honours and enforce it on occasion by military might."
To say that this represents (present-day) India and Pakistan as a pre-Raj unified state is about as useful as saying that Europe between the Rhine and the Oder was a unified state because they elected a Holy Roman Emperor. The Mughals exercised a form of sovereignty yes, but it was severely circumscribed and Aurangzeb's attempts to enforce a more direct authority in the south stretched the system to breaking point (which is what gave the British their opportunity to 'divide and rule' the various successor states and establish their control over the subcontinent a couple of generations later).
Regards
Luke
Off the top of my head:
Aerospace contracts
Research into advanced materials, minaturisation techniques, comms, cybernetics, fuels etc
Manufacturing/engineering know-how in above fields
Remote sensing platforms
Sale of launch services/payload mass to foreigners
Whether its a cost-effective use of Japanese tax yen is a tricky question, but given the standard Japanese pork-barrel projects are running out of places/ways to be spent (there are only so many rivers to dam and roads to build after all) maybe diversifying the pork is starting to look like a good idea.
Regards
Luke
Even if its true, yelling about it in this intemperate fashion makes you look like a loon to the 99% of people who can't spare the time to dig into the facts for themselves. Once you look like a loon you've pretty much lost the battle of perceptions and (absent a dramatic reality-check that exposes the true situation to even the most blinkered) you will go on to lose the battle of the facts.
Where many geeks fail is in their blindness to the social context of a situation and their privileging of facts over perceptions. Sure, external reality can bite you in the ass (see any number of Emperor's New Clothes moments throughout history) but in many cases the facts on the ground are a minor component of the overall situation and their external reality can can be easily swamped out by the social reality that an astute political type can construct/adapt to suit their agenda.
We need to get some hardcore memetic engineers on our side if we're going to win this thing.
Regards
Luke
Regards
Luke
Yeah but over a relatively short time (years or decades) the landfill starts seeping methane and returns the C to the atmosphere.
Some of the C might remain sequestered in the ground permanently (for values of 'permanently' suitable to the timescales our civilisation needs to be thinking over these days), but if a barrel of the gobble-gas substitutes for a barrel of diesel mined out the middle east its a net win carbon-wise.
Regards
Luke
The word you are looking for is 'effective'.
A motor vehicle is a far more effective transportation system, in that it can achieve higher speeds, move larger loads etc etc
The guy on the bike is always going to be more efficient, if only because he's not carrying a ton or so of metal and plastic around with him.
Regards
Luke
Which is what he said in the 3rd paragraph.
Regards
Luke
Being energy independant is nice for the US (as a whole) but for the US's ruling elite its not so good - partly because they are heavily invested (literally and metaphorically) in fossil fuels and partly because ruling an energy-independant USA is not such a great thing if the RoW (by which we mean chiefly mean India, China and Russia) is thus able to bootstrap itself to great power status with the reserves made available to them once the US recuses itself from the world oil market.
As you say the US being primus inter pares (or even just a 'concert of powers' nation) as the C22nd dawns is not what rocks the NSC's socks, even if such a US would be far more comfortable than the alternative 'one eyed man in the country of the blind' sort of scenario you sketched out.
I have no idea if that sort of zero and negative sum long-range thinking is an overt part of what the prognosticators inside the Beltway get up to but (a) I wouldn't be at all surprised if it was and (b) even if it doesn't happen in such a baldly machiavelian fashion the institutional set-up in the beltway circus practically mandates an outcome that would have been produced by said machiavel.
Regards
Luke
We already have mechanisms whereby certain sectors can get duty-free diesel, so it should be relatively easy to transition to an administrative regime whereby fuel duties were tied to their fossil carbon loading and 'recovered' diesel and other bio-fuels could compete at the retail selling point.
The key question would be whether those sectors which currently enjoy duty-free privileges on their diesel (farmers chiefly as it happens) could be transitioned off their cheap fuel without provoking unacceptable political or macroeconomic consequences. *That* is a bullet which is going to have to be bitten at some point (and soon) - but the prospect of agricultural areas getting a new source of income (providing feedstock) and employment (running the facilities) might be enough to sweeten the pill of the increased input costs imposed on the farmers. The devil, as ever, lies in the details however.
Regards
Luke
The Nature page mentions a fortran program is included in one of the folders (don't recall which one).
Its a ~1KB text file, so fairly weeny but I've never worked with fortran so I have no idea if that's significant.
From reading various commentaries which discuss the methodological underpinnings of the study (PCE and similar statistical black magic) I would imagine the algorithm slings PCEs around in some fashion - but as I have never worked with fortran or PCEs and glazed over big-time when we broached multivariate analysis in my degree course lo these many years gone by I am utterly incompetant to assess whether the data thus provided are enough to permit suitably skilled yet disinterested observers to reproduce the analysis and make an informed critique of the methodology.
I presume they are, because the hasty google I ran in the wee hours of the morning didn't turn up any 'Mann releases inadequate data in order to hoodwink reviewers' sort of links and I believe that the editors at Nature wouldn't lend themselves to such shenanigans. I could be wrong of course, but I think that's a reasonable position to take in the circumstances.
Regards
Luke
Anyone care to take a WAG as to what fraction of the USA's current diesel consumption would be substituted if all of the turkey guts in the USA's agricultural sector were redirected to this process at an 80% recovery efficiency?
I'd do it myself but I need to grab a sandwich before my next meeting.
Regards
Luke
Yeah, but all the examples Crichton cites of how the scientific consensus has been tooth-grindingly wrong in the past are of the 'excess conservatism, skeptical of fads' type. Given that the Global Warming hypothesis is a new thing, rather than a longstanding orthodoxy, these are poor examples to use if you are trying to make a coherent argument that the current scientific consensus is malign and/or wrongheaded.
The difficulty for Crichton is that there are very few examples where science gets it wrong by embracing an idea too quickly (off the top of my head I can't think of any examples, although doubtless someone will chip in with some suggestions soon enough). He makes a stab at it with his example of SETI and the Drake Equation, but I thought this was an incredibly weak and wrong-headed argument. SETI may have got its initial start back in the 60s but it went pretty much nowhere for the next 40 years for most of the reasons that Crichton slammed it - an absence of useable data and therefore no way to test hypotheses or form theories. SETI has only got going again in recent years because the computational power is now available to make a decent fist of analysing enough data to do a proper survey of the sky and the work done locating extra-solar planets has shown that you can achieve meaningful things even with the paltry sensor data we can currently muster. Even so SETI remains a distinctly poor relation in astronomy and what kudos its garnered is largely due to the work SETI@home has done developing distributed computing tools for brute-force data analysis. So this is hardly a shining example of bandwagon jumping scientists. Crichton's on slightly stronger ground with the nuclear winter example, but by Crichton's own account Sagan et al didn't create a scientific orthodoxy with their media grandstanding, he concedes that many scientists were skeptical of the proposition (albeit many were reluctant to air their skepticism in the general media) and that this skepticism deepened as it was put under scientific scrutiny. So again this is actually a good demonstration of how day-to-day science is actually an institution which is extremely small-c conservative at heart - which is a problem if, like Crichton, you are trying to argue that in this case an entire field of study has been captured by flim-flam artists who are pulling the biggest con of the century on the world out of some misguided desire to stick it to Uncle Sam.
I also think it is interesting that the people who mutter darkly about how PC, liberal, anti-capitalist, US-hating, bien pensant orthodoxy is the real driving force for the current scientific consensus on climate change overlook how scientists behaved when they were subjected to the posterchild historical example of this sort of politically mandated science - namely Lysenkoism.
Even with the horrendous coercive power of the Stalin-era soviet state hanging over them, significant numbers of established scientists went to the gulag rather than bend to the politically motivated orthodoxy that was imposed upon them and an entire generation of Russian students deserted biology completely when it became clear that they wouldn't be permitted to pursue any line of research whose results might threaten the party line.
Is anything remotely similar happening in climate science today? Have dozens of eminent climatologists been arrested by Green Army cadres and forced to admit their guilt before being despatched to work camps in Nunavut? Are ambitious young grad students deciding that geology or marine biology won't require that they sign away their scientific conscience if they want to get a decent postdoc assignment? I think not.
Therefore if the climate change conspiracy theorists are correct and this whole warming thing is a put-up job - in the absence of a stalin-style tyranny physically oppressing dissenters, where are they? Where are the scientists who have sat down with the data, given it a thorough going over the best way they know how and are convinced that th
Gotta give 'em some props for sticking to what they know don't you think?
Regards
Luke
You can also get them from Nature.
Regards
Luke
In the meantime I will deal with this to be going on with:Firstly, I was civil to you in my post. I'd appreciate it if you could return the favour.
Secondly, you overlooked the specifics of my example and so missed the point I was trying to make. Here it is again, hopefully phrased in a more explicit fashion.
Let us imagine that tomorrow (24th Feb 2005) the weather in London is going to be sunny and 70 degrees. Now for anyone remotely familiar with the climate of London in February, this would most definitely not be 'what you expect'. London in February is miserable - chilly, overcast, damp... all the cliches about the English climate rolled into one (barring the fog, we hardly ever get the sort of pea-soupers Basil Rathbone had to deal with when he was being Sherlock Holmes, but I digress).
Let us further imagine that the guy doing the weather bulletin tonight (23rd February) has an accurate forecast for tomorrow (this isn't so incredible - the Met Office is actually pretty good out to 72 hrs these days, which is just as well given the amount of money they spend). Now this weather guy, being a professional meteorologist, is intimately familiar with London's climate so he knows 'what to expect' for London in February, but he also has a forecast which says that the weather (ie the actual meteorological conditions that are going to occur over London on the next day) is going to differ radically from what all his training and experience tells him is the norm for London at this time of year.
So he starts his bulletin by saying that its going to be sunny and 70 degrees tomorrow (ie 'I expect the weather will be XYZ') and then he probably then goes on to say how unusual this is when compared with what you would normally expect and imparts some factoid like 'this will be the highest ever February temperature for London since detailed records started to be kept in the seventeenth century' or something (ie. 'But if I hadn't seen all the data that's come in over the last three days I would have expected it to be ABC').
Thus his text for the bulletin demonstrates that he he has two, contradictory, expectations. The specific one (which relates to the actual weather that is forecast to occur at this place and that time) and a more general one (which relates to the statistical trend encompassing all the weather events for the relevant place over a specific, usually long, period of time).
Does that help?
Regards
Luke
...if a model can recreate what has already happened then that increases confidence that this model has something useful to say about the system being modelled. Yes?
...if some models do a better job of recreating observed reality from a known starting point than a bunch of other models, there are grounds for saying that these models appear to be closer to the gnarly reality than those other models that don't produce as close a match. Yes?
Furthermore the activity of taking these models and testing them in this way; seeing where they diverge from the observed reality and then digging in to the model (and how the reality was observed) in order to figure out where and how the artefacts have occured. This sort of studious, painstaking and rigorous testing (which is what a large fraction of the work done in the climate modelling field actually is) is a hell of a long way from your original assertion that these arrogant asshole climatologists depend solely on computer models and pay no attention to the real world. So thanks for conceding the point, however gracelessy.
Moving on to your new point - yes actually, it's a big deal when computer models can replicate what has been historically observed. AFAIR everyone I've encountered in the climate modelling field concedes that the early computer models left a lot to be desired and did a piss poor job of replicating historical trends when given the initial conditions. But the models have been subjected to a huge amount of refinement over the years and one of the ways climatologists are confident that this refinement was productive is because now the models can replicate historical trends and do so to very demanding confidence levels. Models can always be improved of course and in the sort of non-linear systems under discussion there are almost certainly going to be unanticipated factors that only emerge as the system moves a significant distance from its previous equilibrium (as would appear to be happening with the global climate). So I fully expect that next year's models, and next decade's for that matter, will be better than those that went before.
Having said all that the bad news to date for those who doubt the climate change hypothesis (actually its bad news for all of us) is that as the models have been refined, the predictions they make when you run them forward into the unknown are pretty much always worse than was previously supposed. The forcing effects observed in these models when run into the future are almost always larger and more rapid than the most pessimistic assumptions of even a few years ago.
That, for me, is the really fucking scary part. Obviously its not exactly great that things appear to be happening to our climate which look like they'll screw things up for large fractions of the human race; but its really bad that after nearly twenty years of effort to scope out the size and severity of the problem we seem to be facing, climatologists are still groping for the bottom of how bad it could get and are regularly reporting back to say that sorry, the hole appears to be even deeper than was previously estimated.
Personally I'd be over the moon if it turned out that there really is some horrendous methodological or institutional bias in the climatological field that means this whole thing has been the biggest scientific fuck-up since Lysenkoism; but given the number of people who are working on this problem, all the different axes its being attacked from, the fact that practically all of the disputation within the field is about how fast climate change is happening as opposed to whether it is happening and the regular litany of 'the heating trend is more severe than was previously thought' results that get reported - the odds of this actually being the case seem, to me, to be vanishingly small.
Regards
Luke
You appear to have overlooked the fact that the study these 'arrogant' scientists were conducting was in fact a test of several different models against a 40 year series of actual ocean temperature measurements. So they were taking these models that you contend they unquestioningly rely upon and stacking them up against real-world data to see if they were any good.
God damn those pesky scientists and their arrogant way of looking for facts to back up their conclusions. God damn them all to hell.
Regards
Luke
You know, when making cracks about people's literacy (or lack of same); it helps if you can actually spell.
Regards
Luke
NB
Any post correcting spelling is inevitably going to have a spelling mistake of its own. In an effort to pre-disaster this post I've decided to misspell this ward here.
No. Crichton's statement (specifically the bit that was italicised for emphasis by RealClimate.org) was:
"No longer are models judged by how well they reproduce data from the real world"
The 'increasingly' you have latched onto is in the subordinate clause that follows on from this, where Crichton rows back from the bold rhetorical claim that he wants his audience to remember. RealClimate.org's critique focuses on the main claim, not the weasel words Crichton puts in as a get out of jail card. So they turned to the IPCC Report that Crichton cited in the bibliography to his novel (and thus can be assumed to have read), which gives a good overview of current research and point to ~150 pages in that report that go into how climatoligists take computer climate models and assess them against RW data.
How does this square with Crichton's subsequent claim in this article that such models are no longer being checked against the real world?
[on comparing two different kinds of predictions]
No, it is not a weather prediction, yes - it is a climate prediction. Woe is me, I have fallen into your cunning trap...
and upthread you wrote...
By which I think you're saying that RealClimate's definition ('what you expect') applies to any forecast/prediction, right? Because a prediction or a forecast is what you are expecting to happen?
Sadly you have misread the RealClimate writer's intent. If you had bothered to follow the three definitional links that they included in the subsequent sentence you would have found that actually they (or rather, climatologists) define 'climate' as the statistical average of various meterological metrics over a wide area and time, whereas 'weather' is an instance of those self-same metrics for a specific time and location.
Thus the 'what you expect' part of the tag refers to the statistical nature of what climate is rather than any predictive attributes it might have, whilst the 'what you get' part of the tag refers to the specificity of what weather is (or will be).
So the guy on the news who tells me that tomorrow there's going to be bright sunshine and 70+ temperatures isn't telling me 'what I expect' (in February, in London) but it might well be 'what I get' (not this week it seems however, brrrr!).
Hope that helps.
Regards
Luke
OK, but the distance from Albany to Montgomery is near enough the same as the distance from London to Rome, Stockholm, Warsaw or Budapest.
Italians, Swedes, Poles and Hungarians are culturally quite distinct from most of the people I'll meet on my daily round (for the sake of this discussion we'll leave out those I know who have immigrated to London from those other places).
People from these places speak different languages, use different money, obey different laws, decide their vote on different issues, believe different things, holiday in different places, eat different food, drink different booze, buy things in different shops.... there's a lot of differences there, OK?
Convergence under the auspices of the EU is breaking some of these differences down, but the process will take decades/generations to get to where the US is now (if it can get that far at all).
Regards
Luke
I'm late to the game but, as a service to sanity, could the horde of kneejerk posters who have spewed variations on:
* Michael Crichton says its a con
* They were talking about an ice age in the 1970s why can't they get their story straight?
* Its all fluctuations in the sun's output
* Volcanoes produce way more CO2 than us
* They can't tell if it'll rain tomorrow, how can they talk about a hundred years from now?
* There isn't a solid consensus about climate change
* So what if all the scientists agree? Science isn't a popularity contest
* We'll farm the tundra
* The scientists are all in it for the grant funding
* Climate Change is an anti-american plot
and similar rants check out the relevant RealClimate.org articles so that next time they'll be a bit more informed on the subject.
Thanks.
Luke
There was a documentary on BBC Radio 4 last night discussing software patents. It didn't really touch upon the current shenanigans in Brussels and there was nothing new for those of us here who are familiar with the various arguments but I thought it was an interesting straw in the wind - the issue appears to be creeping up the news agenda a bit.
Anyone interested can get an audio stream of the programme from the BBC's listen again website for the next few days. The strand was 'In Business' and the patent programme will be available up until the next episode in the strand is broadcast (Wed or Thurs I think).
Regards
Luke